China Owns ‘Great Firewall,’ Credits Censorship With Tech Success

People in Hangzhou mark the 10th anniversary of Alibaba's popular shopping site in 2013, bearing signs declaring "I love Taobao"

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All those people worried that China's Internet controls are stifling innovation and hindering business decisions, please relax. According to the central government, censorship has actually been a boon to the country’s economy.

In a press conference this week, Ministry of Industry and Information official Wen Ku declared that China’s Internet companies owe their successes to the “good policy environment” created by the Chinese government.

It’s a message that was promptly recirculated, notably on Wednesday, in a Global Times piece that said the “Great Firewall,” as the country’s sophisticated Internet filtering system is commonly known, was in fact misunderstood.

“The firewall blocks certain overseas websites in a targeted fashion, rather than isolating China’s internet from the overseas one,” the column ran.

The column repeated an argument often made by tech analysts: that the success of China’s biggest Internet giants -- Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, the so-called “BAT” of the country, with billions of dollars in market value – could be credited to the firewall. Conventional wisdom in China tech circles holds that blocking of sites like YouTube, Twitter and Google has provided Chinese Internet giants with the space they needed to grow.

Without the firewall, Global Times said, “China would become the realm of Google China, Yahoo China and Facebook China.”

While that defense is not new, the fact that the newspaper, a nationalistic tabloid published by the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily, so directly refered to the firewall is unusual. Chinese authorities have generally danced around discussions of the filtering system, declaring instead that Internet content must abide by national “rules.”

The effort to own the country’s censorship system comes at a time when Beijing has grown more vocal in asserting its right to decide what content can be shared in China. In November, for example, when asked whether Facebook would continue to be banned from entering China, Chinese’s top internet regulator Lu Wei told reporters that China had the right to select its own “guests.”

Around the same time, Mr. Lu presided over China’s first World Internet Conference, an gathering of mostly Chinese Internet executives and policy makers aimed at promoting a vision of the Internet dominated by concerns over risks and security.

Online, the Global Times column was circulated thousands of times, mostly accompanied by angry commentary, with some microbloggers complaining about the Chinese government’s recent additional crackdowns on the VPNs, or virtual private networks, that allow users to bypass the country’s Internet filters.

“Now the government is shamelessly putting the Great Firewall on the table rather than work around it,” said one Weibo user.